Ronald Reagan, Books, and Happenstance
Katy always gets onto me for buying books–mostly because we live in a 300 square foot, one-room apartment. “We have no room,” she says.
But I still like to buy them. I buy books that I’m interested in but don’t have time to read. So, I end up with a lot of books around that I’d like to read, but which I haven’t read yet. I like this. It makes choosing a new book from my own shelf kinda like going to a bookstore where everything offered is something I’m interested in. I get to browse a pre-selected list within my own home.
It also allows for moments of synchronicity and happenstance. Which brings me to our fortieth president.
I wasn’t a particularly moved when Ronald Reagan died. In my mind he’d been gone for a long time already. In fact, I was a bit put off by all the hoopla surrounding his passing. It seemed somehow… too much.
During Reagan’s mourning week, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I finished it late at night and before going to bed. The next morning I was browsing my shelf looking for the next book and saw “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” by Edmund Morris.
There was a lot of press surrounding the book when it originally came out in 1999 due to the unorthodox method of the biographer. Not only was Morris was Reagan’s official biographer, but he was the only official presidential biographer to began work while a president was still in office. Starting in about 1984, Morris practically lived with Reagan for the next eleven years. But despite this unprecedented access, Morris couldn’t seem to finish the book. He claimed that Reagan was inscrutable, even after all that time. That despite his jovial, grandfatherly public persona, Reagan the man was very closed and reluctant to share his feelings. His inner life. As a result, Morris was left with mountains of notes, interviews, and archival material but was afraid that the sum of these facts wouldn’t do justice to “man.” So, Morris decided to do something very strange.
Instead of writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, Morris wrote a memoir of Edmund Morris that happens to deal primarily with Ronald Reagan. Not only that, but the Edmund Morris in this memoir is also fictional. Morris re-cast his own life in manner that made him a contemporary of Reagan—growing up in a nearby town, attending the same college, and working with him in Hollywood during the WWII. [That’s as far as I’ve gotten in the narrative.] All the facts are correct. All the events really happened. All the other characters in the book are real. The narrator, however, is an invention.
Intriguing, no? But back to my bookshelf.
A couple of years ago my mom and I were in a bookstore while I was visiting Arkansas. She knows I love books (I got it from her) so she was offering to get buy me a book or two. [Don’t you love how parents do that?]
I grabbed the “Dutch” book because it’s one of those things that I wanted read but would probably never get around to buying for myself. (I mean it is a 900-page biography of a president I don’t even particularly care for. In the same vein, the other book I got that day was a new translation of Dante’s Inferno—still unread.) So I got the book, put it on my shelf and there it sat for the last three years.
So early one morning, on the day before Reagan’s funeral in D.C., I find myself in my little apartment holding his biography. Cool.
I’m only about a third of the way through, but so far I’m impressed.